Interaction multiplexing

Posted Dec 22, 2025 9:23 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: Interaction multiplexing by mathstuf
Parent article: Conill: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities

I like the general idea but why do they need to be requests to agents at all, wouldn't it be even simpler if they were just notifications about a new password request so that even seats where the user logged in after the request was created could respond to the request by polling for pending requests after login or when the user asks for them explicitly?

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Interaction multiplexing

Posted Dec 22, 2025 14:11 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Polkit sits on DBus, so you're stuck with a "proper" agent there. The systemd protocol is "drop files in a directory", so you could definitely use notification actions to trigger the actual prompt (systemd-gnome-ask-password-agent does this). It also scans on startup and sends notifications for anything "laying around" when it starts up. Just need something that doesn't rely on a GUI and notification daemon (the TTY agent I mentioned).

Interaction multiplexing

Posted Dec 22, 2025 17:01 UTC (Mon) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

Yes, I think this makes sense; essentially, decoupling request creation from request fulfillment. I think this pushes in the direction of making the request durable and discoverable, which I like. I think it's largely orthogonal to the idea of making the routing contextual.